I'm not saying Zig will go the same way, I hope it succeeds. But success in industry funding is not a guarantee, successful transition to large team contributions is not a guarantee, and even if all of that does pan out, by then the language may be markedly different.
Look at Rust in 2012 vs its 1.0 in 2015 and ask yourself if you'd want you and your team to have to make so many changes to production code. Ask yourself how many unknown costs you are willing to risk in exchange for whatever you believe is the actual upside of using Zig for a particular project.
Sure, somebody has to break that cycle by making those bets, but be sure before deciding to be among them. Somebody else making that bet only changes the odds so much.
(I'm not even willing to entertain the notion that they would fork Zig and maintain it long term. Even if they somehow did which would be nuts on its own, they'd still be cut off from the rest of the ecosystem and lose out on that front.)
My best case for Zig is that it offers a worthwhile option to clean up existing C & C++ projects without incurring, or at least deferring, the more substantial costs of rewriting outright in Rust, bindings or no. "Maintain it in Zig" is a sensible value proposition, or at least it will be once that Zig code has a compatibility promise so it's not trading one maintenance cost for another.
Look at how costly it was for the ecosystem to migrate from Python 2 to Python 3, even despite how many participants in that ecosystem were themselves large, well-funded corporations. Situations like that are why Go and Rust have made permanent 1.0 compatibility promises even at the cost of some tech debt which they know will only accrue further. Zig will too, but it hasn't yet, and anybody adopting it now risks unknown migration costs.
> Then again, I can’t predict the future and it could very well be that bun and zig both blow up. Same could be said for Rust.
Sure, lots of things are possible, but ask yourself which is more likely. That's all I'm saying here. Rust has already been where Zig is now and is in a meaningfully different place today: a stability promise and substantial industry adoption and contribution. It no longer depends on any one person and a lot of investment is going in to its continued success.
Anything can still fail, but there aren't that many examples of languages outright failing after reaching this point in industry adoption. There are many examples of languages outright failing by pushing backwards-incompatible changes on the industry right in the middle of what should have been a healthy growth curve. There are also many examples of simply not offering enough marginal value to justify their marginal costs.
The title here is "C++, D, and Rust" and, I'm sorry to say, but one of these is not like the other ones. Zig will have a lot of work to do in order to end up more like Rust than D, especially when memory and thread safety are a big part of why the industry is adopting Rust in the first place. Notice how Chromium does not have a Zig branch just like it never had a D branch. It was all C++ until Rust offered clear improvements to safety in exchange for its adoption costs.
